in my dream …
As I move around the house this morning, toiletries, passes, vitamins, water. I feel as I’m walking through the character of my dream. I woke to my alarm and immediately went back into my dream.
As I feel it now, the dream character is about newness. Birth. Freedom. Choice. Free Will. Becoming an adult.
In my dream, I had a keen sense of being somehow socially unclean. Whether it was my family, my clothes, my status, my education, whatever. I had the distinct sense that I had to earn a good regard or even a neutral regard from the authority figures. I felt young; child-like, but at least a teenager.
I was in a place with a high vaulted ceiling. There was something like a fair or show going on, where everyone was displaying things to be viewed or judged. There were rabbits, but also art and dancing and similar performances. There were guides or similar authority figures helping us, the children, to put together, organize and get our displays up. It was a bustling atmosphere; productive, organized, and with that hurry-up-and-wait character that so many organized events have.
There was something about rabbits where I was looking after one of the cages of rabbits. There were 2 males in one cage and they were pretty cute so I ‘took over’ caring for them for a few moments- really an excuse to get some bunny cuddles and have a few cute interactions. When along came some confusing interaction with a woman who insisted that I put a larger rabbit in the cage with them. Not knowing anything, I said, ‘okay’, and did as she asked. I placed the larger rabbit in there and the woman left. Someone else later came by- a much shorter woman- looking for her rabbit. Is this the one? I asked, pulling out the larger rabbit as it matched her description. The short woman was relieved and grateful to find her rabbit. “How’d you find her? I thought she’d ran away” the woman confessed, although not really listening and too distracted fussing over her rabbit, didn’t hear my concern that her female bunny was just with 2 males. She held her large rabbit lovingly and left.
I left the place with the vaulted ceiling and entered a more sterile institutionalized block hallway full of doors. It was reminiscent of a high school, although different in some unexplainable way.
I was removed from some classes with my peers for some time. Time seemed to flash before me without my experiencing it as such. There were impressions and happenings almost like a dream-within-a-dream that was being projected before me on a screen. The institution deemed me unclean. It was socially unacceptable for me to be around the other students in that place. I was taken to a private space anytime I went there. I went into a place with sterile, bright white lights, and time passed. Something significant. Quite soon I was back in the high school like place and I was again experiencing time at a normal pace.
“Oh, here you are, M-, I’ll take you to your class.” a frumpy but clean “teacher” said to me. It was odd. I couldn’t tell if it was male or female. There was something ‘off’ about how he/she looked- like someone acting like a high school teacher but clearly not. This was also the character of the ‘high school’ and everything in the dream.
The ‘teacher’ took me into a classroom where there was already an assigned seat for me at a table of perhaps 6 or 7 other classmates. They cleared the space- clearly having been accustomed to taking it over in my absence. “Happy birthday, by the way,” the ‘teacher’ told me as he/she left the room.
I had several thoughts in succession just then. “I’m not pregnant anymore so they’re suddenly letting me back into the school as if nothing had happened.” and, “Pregnant- that must mean it’s been at least several weeks since that place with the bright sterile lights and giving birth.” I felt and looked down at my belly- flat as could be and my strength and agility left no hint that I was ever pregnant. I experienced a happy glow of well-being. A follow up to that was “That must be why it’s my birthday already- it’s already halfway through the school year!” and, “If it’s my birthday- how old am I? Eighteen. Eighteen! That means I can leave this place of my own accord!” and a feeling of having realized freedom encompassed me as a warm glow.
I did not feel alarmed or upset at all about ‘finding out’ about my pregnancy or birth and re-integration into the ‘class’- rather it explained the prior character of having been socially dirty and an outcast that I experienced as a nameless character of the dream.
More, I never considered at all any implications for how I became pregnant, who the father was, nor even where the baby was or who it was with. Rather, I contemplated the meaning of having a teen pregnancy and the social shame- how this one thing seems to entirely derail and control the trajectory of one’s life. I thought of a friend, T, who had this very life experience of giving birth at 17. I wondered at how profoundly her life was impacted by it.
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